Problems with Scandinavian letters (UTF8/iso8859-1 related?)

kristian · 2005-06-03 23:15:55

I have problems with three Scandinavian/Norwegian letters: "æÆøØåÅ". I will refer to them as Norwegian letters.

I'm able to type them pretty much everywhere, with an exception for aterm(and programs inside aterm. i.e. vim) and links(the console web-browser). "Everywhere" includes: Xorg(xfce, kde, gnome...), command line, and xterm.

But in irssi, through xterm or command-line(when not in X), I'm not able to read norwegian letters. With an exception for the ones I'm writing myself. Yes, even after I've posted them om the irc-channel.

Irssi through aterm allows me read norwegian letters written by others, but I can still not write them myself.

I tried irssi both with and without screen. No difference.

Norwegian letters written in vim using xterm, and saved. Is viewable everywhere except in aterm.

From what I've heard this could have something to do with utf8 and iso8859-1. As aterm doesn't support UTF8(?). And pretty much everyone on Norwegian IRC-channels uses iso8859-1(?).

I might bee using UTF8 only...

"loadkeys no-latin1"  or "loadkeys no" in xterm/aterm gives me:
Loading /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/no-latin1.map
Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console

I hope someone out there has the solution, or can put me on the right track.
Thank you in advance.

xerxes2 · 2005-06-03 23:49:31

hallå norrbagge

you set your locale in some sort of init file, i use ~/.bashrc
i use english utf8 but you can use what you like,

export LC_ALL="en_GB.utf8"

you find which one to use with "locale -a" ,
you can also try "rxvt-unicode" which is one of the best terminals, it's in the "community" repo,

kristian · 2005-06-04 13:33:18

Haha, I understand most of the Sweedish language, but I never get the nickname you guys are using on us: "norrbagge"... I guesing it not excactly the same as "normann"?

Setting locale in .bashrc did not solve my problems. Tried them all.

After putting <export LC_ALL="nb_NO.iso88591"> in .bashrc, the comand: "locale" gives me:
in xterm:

[kristian@localhost ~]$ locale
LANG=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_NUMERIC="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_TIME="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_COLLATE="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_MONETARY="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_MESSAGES="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_PAPER="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_NAME="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_ADDRESS="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_TELEPHONE="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_MEASUREMENT="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_ALL=nb_NO.iso88591

in aterm:

[kristian@localhost ~]$ locale
LANG=no_NO.ISO-8859-1
LC_CTYPE="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_NUMERIC="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_TIME="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_COLLATE="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_MONETARY="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_MESSAGES="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_PAPER="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_NAME="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_ADDRESS="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_TELEPHONE="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_MEASUREMENT="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_ALL=nb_NO.iso88591]

Why doesn't "LANG" match with the others? Where can I change it?

The loadkeys-problem was because I forgot to run it as root :oops: But it did not solve anything.

I got the Idea that aterm might be compiled without support for Norwegian letters, and tried to recompile it. Man that is easy to do with "abs"!! But it did not solve my problems , or maybe I just tried the wrong flags. Tried --enable-greek --enable-big5 --enable-kanji, but all I got was som werid japanese(or something) letters. I reinstalled aterm from current.

xerxes2 · 2005-06-04 22:28:13

i have a little hard to follow your post but here are a few suggestions for you,

1. use utf8 instead of the obsolete isoxxxx crap,

export LC_ALL="nb_NO.utf8"
export LANG="nb_NO.utf8"

2. tell all your friends to switch to utf8

3. use "rxvt-unicode" instead of aterm, it's in "community" repo,

4. enjoy all languages in the world without ever again bother with encoding stuff,

amen 8)

kristian · 2005-06-06 20:05:15

(I was about to blame my poor English, but the truth is that I would have made it equally difficult to understand in Norwegian )

OK, just tried one last terminal (Eterm). ÆØÅ works, and for some reason it's using iso8859-1. Even when setting utf8 in .bashrc. So I'll be using that one for irssi. Just to be aterm-frendly (aterms utf-support does not include Norwegian letters, form what I've heard)

What's left is to decide witch terminal I'll use for normal work... But I won't need help for that

Tusen takk xerxes2!! And yes, I'll switch to UTF8 for everyting but irssi.

(Shocked by the news from Apple)

Arch Linux

#1 2005-06-03 23:15:55

Problems with Scandinavian letters (UTF8/iso8859-1 related?)

#2 2005-06-03 23:49:31

Re: Problems with Scandinavian letters (UTF8/iso8859-1 related?)

#3 2005-06-04 13:33:18

Re: Problems with Scandinavian letters (UTF8/iso8859-1 related?)

#4 2005-06-04 22:28:13

Re: Problems with Scandinavian letters (UTF8/iso8859-1 related?)

#5 2005-06-06 20:05:15

Re: Problems with Scandinavian letters (UTF8/iso8859-1 related?)

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